Today we’d like to introduce you to Kathleen Roll.
Hi Kathleen, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
We (Justin Simmons & Kathleen Roll, owners of Tony & Pete’s) have worked in restaurants since we were old enough to work. Throughout the years we started to take it pretty seriously, and we found ourselves gravitating toward the beverage side of things. We worked at and managed some really good bars & restaurants in our hometowns of Dayton, Cincinnati, and Chicago.
In March 2020, we were living in Chicago and starting to get pretty serious about opening a bar there. When the pandemic hit, and everything got completely shaken up, fortunately, we were able to get out of that situation and took the downtime to think about returning to Dayton to live near our families. We poured all of our energy into writing a business plan for a business we thought made the most sense for Dayton.
We had gotten pretty burnt out from working late nights in bars and wanted to shift to something with a daytime focus. We were big fans of the sandwich shops and neighborhood markets that we frequented in Chicago and thought that template would make a lot of sense in Downtown Dayton, so we figured out a way to make it happen. We moved back to Ohio and started grinding with the focus of bringing Tony & Pete’s to life until we finally figured out how to do it. We opened in July 2022.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
We learned quickly that entrepreneurship is not a smooth road. We are a couple of bartenders that poured our savings into a downpayment for a small business loan to finance this thing. We don’t have any super-rich investors bankrolling us, so it was a grind for us to make sure all of our bases were covered.
Small businesses are still very much dealing with the effects of the pandemic, and that affects everything from our cost of goods to construction materials to staffing. So from day one, a lot of our days are spent putting out fires and finding creative solutions to various hurdles that arise, but we’re all in and we always find a way to make it work.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We are food and beverage people through and through. We’ve been able to accumulate a pretty decent pedigree within the bar world working in and overseeing some of the nation’s top bars and restaurants. We’ve also done pretty extensive beverage consulting both in Ohio and Chicago, helping owners get new beverage-focused concepts up and running.
We’ve been involved with overseeing national beverage conferences and have just generally been in the mix in the bar world for a long time. With Tony & Pete’s, we take that experience and channel it through a casual lens, offering grocery staples and really good sandwiches that are classic but done very well.
We’re always looking for the lessons that can be learned in any situation, including tragic ones like the Covid-19 crisis. Are there any lessons you’ve learned that you can share?
Covid-19 has impacted every piece of us trying to open this business- supply chain issues caused certain construction materials to skyrocket which impacted our buildout. The price of equipment, food, and anything else you can imagine also has gone up substantially making it much more difficult to operate a small business in the startup phase. It’s also impacted staffing, lots of people left this industry throughout the pandemic.
Also, we have a small crew so making sure we keep our staff safe and comfortable is our number 1 priority, both for their well-being and for our ability to operate. The biggest takeaways for us are to be flexible, stay up to date on what’s going on in our community, and listen to the needs of our staff.
Contact Info:
- Website: Tonyandpetes.com
- Instagram: @tonyandpetes
- Facebook: Facebook.com/tonyandpetes
Image Credits
Katie Blauser
